Designer. Gamer. Storyteller.

D4TC: Gesturing Towards Utopias

Queer Theory: According to Merritt Kopas and Naomi Clark

Queer theory is at it’s origin the questioning of heteronormativity along its balancing counterpart, homonormativity.

Heteronormativity: is the belief that people fall into distinct and complementary genders (man and woman) with natural roles in life.

(Man+Woman)

Homonormativity is a word that addresses the problems of privilege in the queer community today as they intersect with White privilege, capitalism, sexism, transmisogyny, and cissexism, all of which end up leaving many people out of the movement toward greater sexual freedom and equality.

(People+People)

Queerness resides not in failure within the confines of the game’s rule system, but in playing with, testing, and perhaps even rejecting those rules themselves.

QUEERNESS IS A REJECTION OF CONFINING RULES FOR BETTER HUMAN GAME RELATIONS.

Human game relations: How people react to games based on their beliefs, and how those games change due to those beliefs.

Early boardgames like The Mansion of Happiness were marketed as socially responsible games that taught children about Christian sins and virtues. (1843). Not long after, games like The Checkered Game of Life spun this in a more secular direction, promoting worldly values like going to college, getting rich, and getting married. (1860)

Yet the controversy of what is different often surfaces no matter the group or medium.

The Gamergate controversy concerns issues of sexism and progressivism in video game culture, stemming from a harassment campaign conducted primarily through the use of the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate.“The “gamer identity” being defended has hardened around cherishing games as a comfort zone where gamers can do and say anything they want without being criticized, without having to think about sexism, and without any girls in the clubhouse save those who tacitly agree not to make a fuss or raise their voices.” They were misogynist, and claimed that “political correctness” and “Journalism” had no place in the gamer world.

They were stopped, but they revealed to us a lot of the bigotry that was left unchecked within this sphere.

“Where can we take queerness and games and where are games taking us? In order to answer this question we need to come back to the question of what queerness means to us.”- Merritt Kopas

All in all queering may be one way to stop bigots. At least in this connotation.